Al-Qaeda spark for an Iran-US
fire By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - After revelations of a US
administration policy to hold Iran responsible for
any al-Qaeda attack on the United States that
could be portrayed as planned on Iranian soil,
former national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski warned last week that Washington might
use such an incident as a pretext to bomb Iran.
Brzezinski, the national security adviser
to president Jimmy Carter from 1977 through 1980
and the most senior Democratic Party figure on
national-security policy, told a private meeting
sponsored by the non-partisan Committee for the
Republic in
Washington on May 30 that an
al-Qaeda terrorist attack in the US intended to
provoke war between the United States and Iran was
a possibility that must be taken seriously, and
that the administration of President George W Bush
might accuse Iran of responsibility for such an
attack and use it to justify carrying out an
attack on Iran.
Brzezinski suggested that
new constraints are needed on presidential war
powers to reduce the risk of a war against Iran
based on such a false pretense. Such constraints,
Brzezinski said, should not prevent the president
from using force in response to an attack on the
US, but should make it more difficult to carry out
an attack without adequate justification.
Brzezinski's warning came a few weeks
after the publication in April of former Central
Intelligence Agency director George Tenet's
memoirs, which revealed that CIA officials had
told Iranian officials in a face-to-face meeting
that the Bush administration would hold Iran
responsible for any al-Qaeda attack on the US that
was planned from Iranian territory.
The
administration has made persistent claims over the
past five years that Iran has harbored al-Qaeda
operatives who had fled from Afghanistan and that
they had participated in planning terrorist
actions - claims that were not supported by
intelligence analysts.
Pentagon officials
leaked information to the Columbia Broadcasting
System (CBS) in May 2003 that they had "evidence"
that al-Qaeda leaders who had found "safe haven"
in Iran had planned and directed terrorist
operations in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
Then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld also
encouraged that inference when he declared on May
29, 2003, that Iran had "permitted senior al-Qaeda
officials to operate in their country".
The leak and public statement allowed the
media and their audiences to infer that the "safe
haven" had been deliberately provided by Iranian
authorities.
But most US intelligence
analysts specializing on the Persian Gulf believed
that the al-Qaeda officials in Iran who were still
communicating with operatives elsewhere were in
hiding rather than under arrest. Paul Pillar,
former national intelligence officer for Near East
and South Asia, told Inter Press Service in an
interview last year that the "general impression"
was that the al-Qaeda operatives were not in Iran
with the complicity of the Iranian authorities.
Former CIA analyst Ken Pollock, who was a
Persian Gulf specialist on the National Security
Council (NSC) staff in 2001, wrote in The
Persian Puzzle, "These al-Qaeda leaders
apparently were operating in eastern Iran, which
is a bit like the Wild West." He added, pointedly,
"It was not as if these al-Qaeda leaders had been
under lock and key in Evin prison in Tehran and
were allowed to make phone calls to set up the
attacks."
Although most elements in the
Bush administration appear to oppose military
action against Iran, Vice President Dick Cheney
has reportedly advocated that course. He has also
continued to raise the issue of al-Qaeda officials
in Iran.
Cheney told Fox News in an
interview on May 14, "We are confident that there
are a number of senior al-Qaeda officials in Iran,
that they've been there since the spring of 2003.
About the time that we launched operations into
Iraq [2003], the Iranians rounded up a number of
al-Qaeda individuals and placed them under house
arrest."
Cheney did not say that the
al-Qaeda officials who were communicating with
other operatives outside Iran were under house
arrest.
As recently as February, Bush
administration officials were preparing to accuse
Tehran publicly of cooperating with and harboring
al-Qaeda suspects as part of the administration's
strategy for pushing for stronger United Nations
sanctions against Iran. The strategy of portraying
Iran as having links with al-Qaeda was being
pushed by an unidentified Bush adviser who had
been "instrumental in coming up with a more
confrontational US approach to Iran", according to
a report by the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer on
February 10.
As Linzer revealed, the
neo-conservative faction in the administration was
still pushing to link Iran with al-Qaeda despite
the fact that a CIA report in February had
reported the arrest by Iranian authorities of two
more al-Qaeda operatives trying to make their way
through Iran from Pakistan to Iran.
The
danger of an al-Qaeda effort to disguise an attack
on the US as coming from Iran was raised in an
article in Foreign Affairs published in late April
by former NSC adviser and counter-terrorism expert
Bruce Reidel.
In the article, Reidel wrote
that Osama bin Laden may have plans for
"triggering an all-out war between the United
States and Iran", referring to evidence that
al-Qaeda in Iraq now considers Iranian influence
in Iraq "an even greater problem than the US
occupation".
"The biggest danger," Reidel
wrote, "is that al-Qaeda will deliberately provoke
a war with a 'false-flag' operation, say, a
terrorist attack carried out in a way that would
make it appear as though it were Iran's doing."
In a briefing for reporters about the
article, Reidel said al-Qaeda officials have
"openly talked about the advisability of getting
their two great enemies to go to war with each
other", hoping that they would "take each other
out".
Reidel, now a senior fellow with the
Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the
Brookings Institution, was one of the leading
specialists on al-Qaeda and terrorism, having
served in the 1990s as national intelligence
officer, assistant secretary of defense and NSC
specialist for Near East and South Asia up to
January 2002.
Supporting the warnings by
Brzezinski and Reidel about an al-Qaeda
"false-flag" terrorist attack is a captured
al-Qaeda document found last year in a hideout of
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. The document,
translated and released by Iraqi National Security
Adviser Mouwafek al-Rubaie, said, "The best
solution in order to get out of this crisis is to
involve the US forces in waging a war against
another country or any hostile groups."
The document, the author of which was not
specified, explained, "We mean specifically
attempting to escalate tension between America and
Iran, and America and the Shi'ites in Iraq."
Gareth Porter is a historian and
national-security policy analyst. His latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in June 2005.
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